This invention relates generally to medical imaging systems, and more particularly, to providing communication between ultrasound scanners in a medical imaging system.
Medical imaging systems are requiring more computational power and memory to perform scans providing higher quality images. Particularly in ultrasound diagnostic medical imaging, the imaging processes are requiring higher computational processing power. The processes require more CPU, memory and storage capacity to perform the image processing required in ultrasound imaging. Improved image quality require larger data sizes to be processed. Moreover, output displayed as three dimensional (3D) and time varying 3D images (known as 4D images) also require larger amounts of raw data and additional processing power to process this more complex raw data.
To provide improved quality images, probes or other medical examination devices must be configured to acquire larger sizes of data. Such probes typically will require a greater number of channels. Often the channels are processed in parallel to acquire a better image quality or decrease scan time.
Improving image quality will require increased computational power of medical imaging scanners. However, this will require modifying existing scanner, replacing existing scanners or performing scans in steps if the processing power of the scanner is insufficient to process the data in a single process.